With the use of blogs and a public Forum on Competency-based Education, Iowa educators are openly reflecting and discussing what it means to commit to all students’ learning by focusing on competencies and flexible resources (including time).

Based on these public reflections, I put together a short-list of questions that come up over and over again. Would anyone who has been working on competency education want to tackle answering one or two of these questions from your perspective?

Why competency education?

Why is competency education important? What is wrong with the current system?

How will competency education help our children? Teachers?

How do we introduce competency education to different stakeholders?

What are the strongest messages to use in engaging different stakeholders?

What needs to be taken into consideration in building public will?

What are the benefits for different stakeholders?

Where are points of potential resistance?

What are techniques for building public support?

What questions will different stakeholders likely have and what are the best ways to address them?

What are the entry points to competency education?

As a teacher, school, district, or state, what are the best ways to introduce competency education?

What are the simplest points of entry?

Are there some entry points or first steps that are more productive and/or more likely to leverage change?

What are the pros and cons for starting in elementary school and rolling up, or starting in high school and rolling back?

What are the most important elements of competency education to implement?

Given that competency education can lead to questioning many of the assumptions of the current system, what are the most important elements to introduce?

Which elements are most productive to building capacity and understanding of competency education?

Which of the elements lead to higher achievement gains?

Which are the simplest to introduce?

How do we best support teachers, parents and students in the process of implementing competency education?